In my first two posts on this blog I looked at the role of metrical substitutions within an iambic base (the post on Crane) and at the role of metrical shifts within ostensibly “free” verse (the post on Ammons). The poem above, by contrast, is a case study in how to use techniques other than metrical substitutions to create a variegated rhythm. Without a single substitution, Dickinson disrupts the steady iambic pulse of her poem in ways that deepen its meaning.

The organizing point of the entire poem is its final word: “Cram.” I will focus extensively on how Dickinson invests this word with especial significance. The efforts begin in the first stanza, which is very nearly perfect iambic trimeter. However, consider the third and fourth lines:

For˘ Earths/, grow˘ thick/ as˘
Ber/ries˘, in/ my˘ na/tive˘ town/ –

The word “Berries” contains what should be the final stress of the third line; that stress is thus shifted to the beginning of the fourth line. The iambic pattern is preserved, but the third line technically becomes a dimeter, the fourth line a tetrameter. This shift serves three purposes: first, it creates congestion in the fourth line that echoes the thick clustering of the “Earths”; second, it places a heavy emphasis on the word “Berries”; third, it foreshadows the shift to iambic tetrameter in the first two lines of the next stanza. At the same time, the third line does not feel overly short. Dickinson achieves this with her use of “grow thick.” Taken out of context, both words want a stress. In context, “thick” takes on a slightly heavier stress, but “grow” is still stressed more heavily than “for” or “as.” Thus there is a sort of faint representation of the missing third stress in line three – all without disrupting the perfect iambs of the poem. Dickinson is thus able to enjoy the effects of moving the stress to the next line without having the third line suffer for it.

Moving now to the second stanza, the poem switches, for two lines, to iambic tetrameter. But even in these two lines, Dickinson does not leave the rhythm unaltered. In both lines, her use of dashes to create pauses ends up isolating a word: in line five, “just”; in line six, “those.” Both words are capable of taking a stress, but in the context of the meter do not. Because, however, they are isolated by dashes, they nonetheless take on a stronger stress than they would otherwise. Dickinson thus gives the appearance that these lines are even longer than they are, heightening the effect of switching to iambic tetrameter. The risk of doing so is to create congestion in the line, but the same dashes that create the slight additional stresses also create space, such that the lines still feel expansive. Just as we saw in the case of lines three and four, Dickinson engages in delicate compensation to enjoy the advantages of her techniques without letting them disrupt the poem.

All of the above sets up the last array of techniques Dickinson employs. Remember that the end result is to invest the word “Cram” with tremendous force. The most obvious way this occurs is by the shift in the last line back to iambic trimeter. The last line thus ends abruptly, relative to the two lines before it, creating a sense of cramming that underscores her use of that word. This shift in context results in the trimeter of line seven having an entirely different effect from the trimeter of the first stanza. In both cases, the trimeter has its customary effect of moving the poem along quickly, but where in the first stanza this quickness creates a smooth and pleasing rhythm, in the final line it jolts the poem to an abrupt halt.

That is not all, however. Both line five and line six have a dash after their fifth (unstressed) syllable. The lines thus end with the same three-syllable, stress/unstress/stress pattern (firm/a˘ment/ / on/ my˘ arm/). Line seven also has a dash after its fifth syllable, but what follows is merely the single syllable, “Cram.” Though the whole line is compressed (from tetrameter to trimeter), this technique ensures that the felt effect of this compression is entirely produced upon arriving at the word “Cram.”

The end result of all of these techniques is to take the word ‘cram,’ which in itself has no particular phenomenological force, and contextualize it in such a way that it actually makes the reader feel crammed. And Dickinson does this all with lovely lilting iambs.